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Francesca Weisman

Francesca Weisman is a lawyer specializing in criminal legal aid work. She has published two novels, Nowhere’s Child and The Shape of a Stranger.

In Nowhere’s Child debut author Francesca Weisman has woven a stunning psychological suspense story, told in three different narratives. Here, Francesca unravels the story behind Nowhere’s Child and ‘strangeness’.

Who is Nowhere’s Child?
A number of characters in the book are Nowhere’s Children. It is a novel about outsiders – particularly children – trying to find out about their roots and where they belong. It begins with a murdered model, who is not who she appears to be. But besides that there is the story of Kit, a bullied autistic boy, obsessed with tracking down his father. And Miranda and Mark, two teenagers in a children’s home, also become caught up in finding out about their pasts. At the point where the storylines interlink the murder is solved. But the real resolution is the unravelling of hidden, personal histories.

Is that why the book takes place in different time frames?
The changing time frames are there to illustrate the hidden connections between past and present. They also give the book a different sort of pace and texture. The reader is introduced to various characters, and gradually it becomes clear who they are and what they’ve done. You have to peel away the layers to reveal the centre of the story.

Kit, the boy looking for his father, suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome, a particular form of autism. What made you write about this and how did you find out about it?
I did read quite a lot about it, and Asperger’s syndrome is a subject that’s very much talked about these days. But the trigger for writing about it, and most of my knowledge of the condition, comes from my brother. He has suffered from Asperger’s syndrome for as long as I can remember, though he was only diagnosed a few years ago. He’s always been rather an unusual character, and it has been a huge factor for our family, especially for me and my sister during childhood. Children can be very cruel and can victimize anyone who’s different. But being close to an Asperger’s sufferer and looking through their eyes can provide some amazing insights. Normal conventions become meaningless, and in some cases comically ridiculous. Kit might start out seeming alien and bizarre, but the reader may come to think he understands the world better than many.

What about your work as a criminal defence lawyer? Does that provide you with any useful raw material?
Most people think a criminal lawyer is bound to have a wealth of material at hand for crime writing, and to a large extent we do. You know about police procedure, the court system, and the way in which a murder investigation is conducted. And the stories behind cases you work on can be violent and extraordinary. It’s incredibly useful to have that knowledge to hand without having to research too much. But for me the characters are what make it really interesting – the psychological and domestic side of things. Sometimes I represent people who seem to come from other worlds, and I get to listen to the stories they have to tell.

So do you feel you are endlessly confronted by strangeness, and you’re trying to capture that in your novels?
Yes and no. I love the idea of a distilling an atmosphere of weirdness and mystery within a novel, and keeping the reader hooked like that. But if you meet individuals who’ve lived through strange happenings, and you find out as much as you can about them, eventually – most of the time – you’ll find more connections than differences. It can be far more chilling to explore what links us to killers rather than what separates us from them, and more often than not they’re simply ordinary people pushed over the edge by circumstance.

So have you met any such people?
Yes, and represented a few. And truth can often be too bizarre for fiction. Actually, what is arguably the most far-fetched plot element in Nowhere’s Child was drawn from real life, though obviously I can’t give that away here.

Will any characters or themes from Nowhere’s Child return in future writing?
Just as Kit suffers from a condition which leads him to view the world differently, so one of the main characters in my next novel, The Shape of a Stranger, also becomes struck down by a condition which turns him into an outsider. And the criminal-legal world is a recurring theme, too. But mostly I’m interested in the darker side of the domestic – families and relationships – and especially in the portrayal of the women. The most traditional crime narrative would have a man rescuing a woman in jeopardy. I’m interested in women taking charge, driving the narrative from as many angles as possible.

Everyone remembers Glenn Close in the iconic 80s movie Fatal Attraction. You know, of course, that she memorably pushed back the boundaries of female sexual obsession with the concept of the “bunny boiler”. And you’re probably familiar with the film’s narrative: how Close committed adultery with perfect family man Michael Douglas, and, when cast aside, returned to wreck his life with the determination of a psychopath and the venom of a witch. It is the quintessential modern take on the crazed malice of the woman scorned.

But what you may not know – and what I found out only by watching one of those ubiquitous televised polls, The Hundred Scariest Movie Moments Ever, or something of that sort - is that the film might have had a different ending. Hollywood’s moguls wanted the most spine-tingling comeuppance possible for their demonic superbitch, but Close fought –unsuccessfully - for a more sympathetic angle. It’s not hard to see why. Think of the situation in real life. Woman falls for married man. The feeling is mutual: he enters into wild, passionate sex, with the promise of more, then abandons her without ceremony or explanation. She is left lonely, bewildered and infatuated, and his complete refusal to acknowledge her drives her quite literally mad with misery. Who is the real villain?

I’ve often thought what great scope there is in a story that looks at the bunny boiler anew. It’s always interesting to turn stereotypes upside down, and most of us are absorbed and frightened by the notion of blind obsession. Besides, though we may not care to admit it, isn’t it true that most women know what it feels like to be unceremoniously dumped, and that we often say the fact of being deserted doesn’t matter so much, it’s the why that’s important. Men walk away. Women – notoriously - seek closure. But the need to resolve things can go beyond irrational.

In my second novel, The Shape of a Stranger, the two main protagonists, Callum and Rosie, play out a kind of variation of the Fatal Attraction theme. It isn’t a story of marital infidelity, but it is about female desire, loss and obsession. Callum is an uber-lawyer and family man whose golden life is just beginning to fragment with the disintegration of his marriage, but who still has an almost supernatural faith in his own resilience. A fateful walk on the heath changes all that, when an unknown attacker delivers a blow to his head, leaving him with a visual disorder. He can still see, and look after himself, but he has trouble distinguishing faces, much like Oliver Sachs’ patient in The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, who famously reached out for his hat and plonked his hand on his wife’s head. To make matters worse, the police tell Callum the assault was a failed murder attempt, and that his potential killer is still out there.

Rosie is Callum’s childhood friend and erstwhile lover who re enters his life when he is at his most vulnerable. While he tries to unravel the mystery of his attacker, she has old scores of her own to settle. For years ago, when they were younger, and passionately in love, he left her quite suddenly and never explained why.

Both characters have secrets in their pasts, and it is Callum’s gradual unravelling of these secrets, along with his quest to find his would-be killer and rediscover his old self, which marks out the novel’s main narrative strand. But it is Rosie’s obsessive hunger in love, her fixated, sometimes crazed need for answers, which gives the story its emotional drive.

There are no obvious good guys or bad guys in Shape, because part of my aim is to confound expectation and blur the boundaries between heroes and villains. But I do think there is something uniquely creepy about a woman teetering on the edge of extreme, perhaps violent behaviour, especially when she is smart and successful and with every reason to be fulfilled.

As a criminal lawyer who has defended countless suspects over the last ten years, in almost every kind of case imaginable, I can tell you that there is a definitely a different sort of dynamic with female defendants. For a start, though I have represented a fair number of girls and women, there have been far fewer of them. Female offending is probably on the increase, but the vast majority of crime at all levels is still committed by men. Where women do offend, there remains a tendency to pigeonhole and stereotype them: the wayward schoolgirl who needs guidance; the single mother from the sink estate who shoplifts to feed her baby; the thieving drug addict who can’t help herself and is probably led astray by a wild boyfriend; the cunning fraudster who keeps her hands clean and wouldn’t do anything really nasty. Or there are the female offenders who lie and cheat to help their men, only one step removed from the classic gangster’s moll.

There is also, in some cases, a peculiar and paradoxical failure on the part of judges (mostly men) to take female defendants seriously. I represented one woman who must have been richer to the tune of millions through various frauds on benefit systems. Part of her scam was to assume myriad different identities, to the point where she appeared taken in by her own deception and would write letters to herself from one persona to another. Over the course of rather lengthy court proceedings, she also took it upon herself to enter into personal correspondence with the judge, never a course recommended by any sane legal adviser. On one occasion the judge in question entered the courtroom, referred – not without humour – to the most recent letter he’d received, announced that, unless anyone objected, he intended to ignore its florid accusations, and simply carried on with the case. A male client of mine, whose case had certain parallels and whose eccentricities were not dissimilar, was on more than one occasion thrown into the cells for contempt of court. It is almost as though female wrongdoing inspires sniggers rather than fear, until the point where it becomes so extreme that we can no longer ignore or trivialize it.

But when it comes to homicide and crimes of the worst violence, only a tiny proportion of offenders are female. Over the years I’ve worked on innumerable cases of murder, serious bodily harm, violent robbery, rape and sexual assault, and I can think of barely one of these instances where my client has been female. So where such women do exist, they become demonized and mythologized. Think of the particular horror generated by Myra Hindley or Rosemary West, or the revulsion provoked by Maxine Carr, who was not herself a killer. Of course their crimes may be immeasurably horrible, but their femaleness chills us that degree more. When, not long ago, a teenage gang rape took place on a London canal tow path, police expressed unprecedented dismay because amongst the jeering onlookers were girls.

In essence, we expect female violence much less, and so find it difficult to accommodate. We greet it with confusion, and are both terrified and fascinated. Shakespeare understood this when creating Lady Macbeth, and so did CS Lewis when inventing the White Witch of Narnia. Minette Walters used it to maximum sinister effect in The Sculptress, as did Stephen King with his brilliantly horrifying Misery.

It’s hardly a secret, then, that the wild, maybe-mad female holds a unique place in the lexicon of fear. But few of us would admit that such prototypes strike a chord. We might like to read about them, but they remain something quite alien. It is the ordinary woman, deranged by disappointment, to whom it is so frighteningly easy to relate.

Years after a brief, uncommitted relationship had ended, a friend of mine tortured herself when finding her ex was about to marry. She seriously considered confronting him and telling him he was wrong. Another moped miserably for months on end because a holiday fling failed to turn into something more. She telephoned and wrote ceaselessly before finally getting the message. I myself remember the ending of a short but (I thought) promising romance, when the said romancer, without warning, began to leave my calls unanswered. Not only did I feel rejected, but it simply didn’t make sense. So some friends advised, without irony, that I should write him a long letter, or perhaps, if I could find his house, even risk a surprise visit.

With just a modicum of perspective, this seems not just ludicrous, but deluded. A manifest failure to take a hint, just a step away from lunacy. (Thankfully I never found it in me to act upon my friends’ advice.) Yet women who behave like this are probably not sad, lonely nutcases. They can be brainy and attractive, with careers, friends and even children. So what drives them to such behaviour? And isn’t it even scarier to view them not as demons but all too human?

Or does all this miss the point: are there other forces at work here? Are all the conventions of romance and sexual relationships still loaded against women, even in the 21st century? Does a lethal cocktail of primal instinct and sexual etiquette mean that men move through lovers easily while women brood and weep and wonder? Is there still an odd ambivalence about female sexuality and desire, so that when women are too forthright, they are scorned, ridiculed or even feared.

Rosie in Shape brings all of these ideas into play and, I hope, provokes a fresh take on some of the pitfalls of relationships. I’ve added something unexpected to the old idea of the wicked wildwoman, playing on our suspicion of her, whilst viewing her from a different angle.

But it would be far too simple to say that Shape of a Stranger is about a pining woman and a heartless bastard. If Rosie is not simply a vengeful, emotionally starved lover, then neither is Callum a mere shallow Casanova. The story is also about his struggle to piece back together his life, and how his newly damaged eyesight makes his whole world strange and frightening. Rosie’s not the only unsettling character lurking in the shadows. It is about the tangled web of buried secrets that both characters have to unearth before it’s possible to understand their actions, and their lives. And about how somebody who’s always been an insider deals with being turned into an outsider, how a man used to love and admiration copes when someone wants him dead.

In their separate quests, Callum and Rosie may have more in common than they realize. Their paths are separate, but connected, and both seek some sort of resolution. But they – and my readers – are in for a few shocks before they get there.